Ween marches to its own changing beat

June 27, 2010|By Andy Downing, Special to the Tribune

In the early '90s, MTV's Butthead (of "Beavis & Butthead" fame) panned Ween's video for "Push th' Little Daisies," bluntly saying, "These guys have no future." But band founders Dean and Gene Ween, who delivered a career-spanning, 150-minute set to a near-capacity Aragon Ballroom on Friday, clearly can enjoy the last laugh, having carved out a decades-long musical career that continues to thrive long after their animated critics disappeared from the airwaves.

Gene Ween, slightly thicker and every bit as disheveled as his partner — both could have passed for auto mechanics in their T-shirts and well-worn jeans — handled the bulk of the vocal duties, frequently stretching and molding his voice like Play-Doh. The shaggy frontman displayed a weathered falsetto on "Don't Get 2 Close," mimicked David Bowie on a disco-trash reworking of "Let's Dance" and intoned "Zoloft" as though it were a dramatic reading at an open-mic poetry night.

Despite sometimes muddy acoustics, the quintet matched its singer's range, swinging from metal to psychedelic rock to acid-fried country. "Piss Up a Rope," one of a handful of tunes sung in a workmanlike growl by Dean Ween, morphed into a hellacious roadhouse boogie that wouldn't have sounded out-of-place at Carol's Pub. A second Dean Ween cut, "With My Own Bare Hands," turned joyously savage, the band locking into an elephantine stomp. Tempo and mood often varied wildly. In one throwdown, the group somehow approximated a fleet of emergency vehicles, dual guitars blaring like sirens as the stage exploded in red light. Just one song removed from that chaos, Gene Ween waltzed his way through a methodical "Your Party."

Like indie-rock Magellans, the band explored the sonic possibilities in its music on a number of extended jams — with varying degrees of success. "Never Squeal," for one, piled on so many drum solos over the course of 10-plus minutes that it bordered on parody. Better was "Johnny on the Spot," which moved between slow passages and explosions of trash compactor riffage, like an army methodically making its way across the countryside and breaking up the long, slow marches with desperate, fiery battles.